Sardine Launches Anti-Fraud Consortium of Financial Institutions and FinTechs

Fraud prevention firm Sardine has launched an industrywide, independent consortium to curtail payment fraud.

The new SardineX will bring together financial institutions and FinTech companies to share data and establish the credentials of senders or receivers of funds for transactions on multiple payment rails, Sardine said in a Tuesday (June 27) press release.

“How we move money has fundamentally shifted over the past few years, and the only way we can close the massive gaps that fraudsters leverage to hurt shared customers is to improve communication between parties who facilitate payments today,” Sardine Co-Founder and CEO Soups Ranjan said in the release.

SardineX is open to any organization that initiates or facilitates money movement, welcomes broad industry participation, and will be structured as an independent organization, according to the press release.

It will offer a shared database of fraud- or compliance-related data that allows participants to query it in real time, ingest the data into their own risk models and share feedback to continuously improve the data, the release said.

Founding members include Chesapeake Bank, Visa, Airbase, Blockchain.com, Alloy Labs Alliance, iLex and Novo, per the release.

“By working together, we can improve fraud detection and recovery so that we can continue to innovate in the payments arena and keep them as a part of everyday life,” Chesapeake Bank Chief Innovation Strategy Officer D.J. Seeterlin said in the release. “We’re proud to be a founding member of the consortium Sardine spearheaded and believe this effort will deliver on greater societal good to curb fraud and keep money where it belongs.”

PYMNTS research has found that criminals are ramping up the intensity and scale of their financial attacks and, in some cases, targeting customers directly.

In this environment, many financial institutions, even those with comprehensive anti-fraud and anti-money laundering (AML) strategies, may struggle to avoid pervasive losses without a modern tech solution, according to “The State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the U.S.,” a PYMNTS and Featurespace collaboration.

In another new anti-fraud effort, Plaid announced Thursday (June 22) that it has launched a collaborative network called Plaid Beacon that is open to FinTechs, financial institutions of all sizes and Plaid-powered customers and allows them to share information about stolen identities and compromised accounts.